Even as California struggles with a chronic affordability crisis, “anti-housing CEQA lawsuits” are targeting more than half the state’s housing production, a recent report claims.
The report, published last month, was prepared for the pro-business group Center for Jobs & the Economy and authored by Jennifer Hernandez, a land use attorney at the firm Holland & Knight. While CEQA, the signature state environmental law that was signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, has been highly controversial for decades, especially within the real estate industry, the Holland & Knight report sought to quantify the law’s impact on new development.
It looks specifically at 2020, as the first component of a three-year survey, and pulls no punches in its assessment.
CEQA lawsuits are “making housing too scarce – and too expensive,” the report states.
“The result: CEQA has indeed become a population control (aka reduction statute). California is losing people, and the people being expelled are our families, our kids and grandkids, our favorite young teacher.”
For the report Holland & Knight compiled lawsuit data that it received from the California Attorney General through public records requests.
In 2020, CEQA lawsuits targeted projects that added up to a total of 48,000 housing units, or just under half of the roughly 100,000 units produced that year, according to data cited by Holland & Knight. But CEQA lawsuits from 2020 also frequently targeted the upzoning of existing neighborhoods, especially near transit, which meant that thousands more potential housing units were the subject of court challenges, according to the report.
“The bottom line: anti-housing CEQA lawsuits target more than half of California’s annual housing production,” it states.
Holland & Knight also took particular aim at two newer provisions of the law related to greenhouse gas emissions and potential impact from commuting. The climate-related provisions, it argues, have given rise to a flurry of new anti-housing suits but have not been adequately clarified by the courts or state agencies, leading to a serious conflict with the state’s housing goals.
“Our team will complete the remaining two years of our 2019-2021 CEQA lawsuit data, but we have no expectation that the pattern of anti-housing CEQA lawsuits … will change,” the report concludes. It added that CEQA “favors legacy residents and special interests,” and argues the state’s families “will continue to fall victim to CEQA lawsuits filed ‘in the name of the environment.’”
The Center for Jobs & the Economy is based in Sacramento and counts advisers affiliated with the Bay Area Economic Institute, McKinsey & Company, Pepperdine University and the Los Angeles County Economic Development Council.
The scathing August report came as the state legislature, a year removed from passing the state’s most notable housing law in decades, passed a slate of four additional pro-housing laws, including an effort to increase residential construction on former strip malls. In recent years state political leaders have also been making efforts to cut into CEQA delays, including with SB 7, a law meant to streamline CEQA requirements for small infill projects that Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed as “cutting red tape.”
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